We left Aleppo after a prolonged stay, and mounting our horses joined a caravan loaded with produce for the supply of the Antioch market. The first few hours, after leaving Aleppo, our road lay over a rocky pathway difficult to ride over, bleak and monotonous in the extreme; but soon the glorious plains of the Amuk spreading before us as far as the eye could reach, burst like a splendid panorama on our gaze. We rapidly descended to their level, and the remainder of our first day’s journeying was over a flat country, whose natural prolific soil, interspersed as it was at short distances with small tributary streams, would have been a sight to gladden the heart of any emigrant who should seek for rich pasturages for his cattle—abundant harvest of wheat and barley—rich orchards and valuable plantations.
All these doubtless once existed at a time when the ruined cities, portions of whose past grandeur still remain to gratify the curious antiquarian, were in their zenith; indeed tradition reports the whole of this extensive plain (which it took us two days’ hard riding to traverse), at its narrowest breadth, to have been once an extensive forest, in some parts almost impenetrable. Now there is hardly a tree to be seen; immense pasturages and fields stretch on every side, and numbers of horses, cattle, and sheep, browse on the luxuriant herbage. We arrived on the third day at the Gessir il Haded, or iron bridge, where we first crossed the Orontes, and after skirting the river for a few minutes, struck off on a wide pathway leading over a mountainous country, richly dotted with trees, and verdant with wild thyme and lavender. Small herds of gazelles, startled from their resting-places by the echo of our horses’ tramp, darted across our pathway, and sought refuge on the further side of the many lofty hills that now surrounded us. The Orontes, in its meandering course, occasionally took a sweep and glided close under our elevated pathway; by and bye we closed in with the river; myriads of water-fowl and other game flew over our heads. There was a stately old ruined castle, on a bleak isolated hill; we passed under its deserted battlements, and in ten minutes afterwards were riding through the streets of the once famed city of Antioch.